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Loading... Aiding and Abetting: A Novelpor Muriel Spark
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adorará Adira ao LibraryThing para descobrir se gostará deste livro. Sometimes a good story is told better when the fiction is kept to a minimum and the facts take center stage. Muriel Spark's short novel Aiding and Abetting falls into this category. Centered around the real life mysterious murder and bludgeoning of Lord Lucan's, Seventh Earl of Lucan, wife and house mistress. An event that still inspires a shade of mystery today. The story unfolds beautifully, giving the reader a possible insight as to why this tragedy took place. But just as the reader is thinking they will have a possible "what-if" scenario, the novel changes pace and adds characters, and plot lines that fall face first in this literary jumble, causing the reader to feel empty, emotionless, unsatisfied, and not very involved with the strange story of deception and fraud. Quirky is okay, but the ending is less than desirable, cannibals? For the die hard Spark fans only. This title is currently available in our library. Happy Reading! (  ) SturgisPublicLibrary | Nov 6, 2009 |  A fun read that doesn't really linger much after the reading. (  ) goldsteph | Oct 17, 2009 | A Lord Lucan ("Lucky Lucan") has killed his children's nanny and bludgeoned his Lady wife. It's years later and two strange characters are seeing a shrink claiming to be the infamous lord. The shrink has a shady past of her own. Beate Pappenheim, now Hildegard Wolf, was a stigmatic who pretended to cure the incurables and other hopeless cases. She made quite a bit of money at this scam, got caught, moved on and set up shop in Paris as a head shrinker. AIDING AND ABETTING sparkles with wit and the things usual that make her always an entertaining story-teller. Sparks novels, never prolix, have the spare beauty of a Hitchcock heroine: Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, or someone of that ilk. Did I mention that this novel was written in her eighties. Porius | Oct 8, 2009 | Before listening to this book, I knew nothing of the Lucan case, but I can see why it would be intriguing. Whatever did happen to Lucan? How would he have gotten by? Who was helping him along the way? In this book, Spark introduces us to several characters who help Lucan out of obligation for their otherwise respectable friend who just committed a bungle. He didn’t mean to kill the nanny; he was after his wife. I think I would have enjoyed this book more had I read it in print. It’s a short book, but there’s a lot going on within it. Spark delves into issues of identity, friendship, social class, and our fascination with true crime. It’s the kind of book that I think requires a slower reading than you get on audio. There were several times when I know I would have flipped back and read passages that happened much earlier if I’d been reading the book, but it’s not practical on audio. On audio, the book was only okay. The plot relied heavily on coincidence, and the ending seemed to come abruptly out of nowhere. The characters were interesting, but they never felt like real people. I think some of the artificiality of the plot and the characterization was intentional, but it doesn’t make for good listening. See my complete review at my blog. (  ) teresakayep | Feb 22, 2009 | Delightfully wicked humor: classic Spark. Fictional literary treatment of two legendary criminals, a fraud and a murderer, who really existed and somehow disappeared. (  ) SirRoger | Aug 5, 2008 |  sem resenhas | adicionar uma resenha
Referências a esta obra em recursos externos.
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Aiding and Abetting opens sometime late in the 20th century, when an Englishman in his 60s walks into the Paris practice of famed Bavarian psychiatrist Dr Hildegard Wolf and announces that he is the missing Lord Lucan. Yet Hildegrad is already treating one self-confessed Lord Lucan. And what's more, both patients seem to have dirt on her--for isn't she really Beate Pappenheim, a notorious fraud who used her menstrual blood to fake her stigmata? Fearing for her safety, Hildegard flees to London, where her path inevitably crosses that of two British Lucan hunters.
Aiding and Abetting contains more than its share of broad farce and bitter irony. But it remains a strange, slight affair, its unspoken tenet being that the Lucan case still preys on the communal mind of the British public, its details (like the perpetrator's penchant for smoked salmon and lamb chops) indelibly printed there. For anyone under 30, that's a difficult argument to swallow. As one wise character puts it: "Few people today would take Lucan and his pretensions seriously, as they rather tended to do in the 70s." Times have changed indeed--and perhaps that's Spark's point after all, that the "psychological paralysis" of the not-quite-swinging '70s is long gone. --Alan Stewart
(retirado da Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400)
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